Lawrence Dillon@Sequenza21.com

"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."

Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.


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Saturday, September 08, 2007
Composer Madness

One of the pieces I’ve just finished is Entrance, a work for narrator and chamber ensemble I had wanted to write for ten years. Yesterday I put the parts to Entrance into envelopes to mail off to the performers. Then I slipped the hard-copy originals into a folder to put into the massive file drawer that holds all of my works.

What did I find already filed under “E”? A piece called Entrance, from 1997. Here I thought I had just been thinking about the piece for ten years, when the truth was I WROTE THE PIECE TEN YEARS AGO. As with a number of my works, I filed it away and forgot it. All I remembered was writing the text and thinking I should get around to setting it to music someday.

The new version is much better than the old one. At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.